This story was originally published by the Louisiana Illuminator.
Confronted with the failure of the Department of Children and Family Services, lawmakers and administrators in Louisiana have responded the way they do in most states:
They slapped a child’s name onto a law to show how much they care.
They created the obligatory special committee to make recommendations, which it has not yet done.
They rearranged the deck chairs on the child welfare Titanic, and now propose to rearrange them some more.
None of this worked. It never does. But at least now one Louisiana lawmaker, Sen. Thomas Pressly, is asking the right question
“Someone has to be doing it better,” Pressly asked DCFS Secretary Rebecca Harris last week, wanting to know who.
No place does child welfare well, but there are a few places that do better than the rest. At one point, one of them was in Louisiana.
All have one thing in common: They are laser-focused on reducing the number of children who ever need to be torn from their families and consigned to the chaos of foster care in the first place.
That issue, and that solution, have been missing from the debate in Louisiana. Instead, DCFS has careened the other way. Between 2020 and 2023, a time when most states were reducing the number of children taken from their homes, Louisiana was responding to horror stories about child abuse deaths with a foster care panic: The number of children torn from their homes over the course of a year skyrocketed more than 50%. The number declined a little by 2025, but entries were still 35% above where they were in 2020.
The theory, of course, was that taking away all those additional children would stop child abuse deaths. In 2024, I wrote about why that wouldn’t work. A foster-care panic increases caseloads, giving workers still less time to examine each case. The horror stories are needles in a haystack. You’ll never find the needles if you keep making the haystack bigger.
New research confirms that foster-care panics don’t work. A study published in December by the authoritative JAMA Network Open examined 3.4 million records of children in foster care from 2010 to 2023, when states attributed 24,108 fatalities to child abuse or neglect. The study found that taking away more children did nothing to reduce child abuse deaths.
Another recent study is the latest in a long lines showing that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically do better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. The latest study, from Sweden, even found that the foster children were more than four times more likely to die by age 20.
The most common cause of death was suicide, which gives some clue concerning the enormous inherent trauma of child removal. All this is before we even reach the studies showing high rates of abuse in foster care itself.
Most cases are nothing like the horror stories. Of all the children taken from their families in Louisiana in 2024, 93% did not involve even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.”
So, to answer Sen. Pressly, here’s who has done it better:
- Former Orleans Parish Judge Ernestine Gray won national acclaim for drastically reducing needless foster care, with no compromise of safety, simply by enforcing the law. She would not allow children to be removed because of poverty. But since she retired at the end of 2020, there’s been backsliding. Reform can’t depend on a single visionary.
- Thanks to a landmark lawsuit consent decree (a member of my group’s board was co-counsel for the plaintiffs), Alabama became an unlikely national leader by focusing on ameliorating the worst aspects of poverty. It works because we know even a little cash for a struggling family can make a huge difference. There was backsliding when the court monitoring ended, but the lessons remain.
- That’s why New York City and New Jersey learned not to rely only on a time-limited consent decree or a single visionary leader. They provide high-quality defense counsel to families caught up in the system — not to get “bad parents” off but to provide alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” churned out by agencies like DCFS. It’s been proven to reduce foster care with no compromise of safety.
The same horror stories that occur in Louisiana happen in these places as well, and these places still take children needlessly. They are not good systems; they are less bad systems.
The place that puts all this innovation together and sticks with it could become the first genuinely good system in child welfare. Louisiana would be an excellent place to start.
Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, which seeks comprehensive change in the child protective system. Learn more at www.nccpr.or
